WhatsMenu has always called the things customers occupy "tables" — because most dine-in venues think about them that way. But a salon assigns chairs, a clinic assigns rooms, a co-working space assigns desks, an auto dealership assigns vehicles. Forcing every business to read "table" in their staff panel and on their customer receipts always felt off.
Two changes shipped together:
1. Tables is now an app you toggle on under Settings → Apps
It joins Floor Plan, Reservations, POS and the rest. Enable it whenever your business assigns customers to a physical spot — restaurants do, but so do salons (chairs), clinics (rooms), co-working hosts (desks), auto dealers (vehicles), and any service business with appointment slots. If your business is pure delivery / pickup / showcase, leave it off and the menu stays clean.
2. You pick what to call them
Inside the Tables app card, you'll find two label fields:
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Singular — what you call one of them (defaults to "Table"). Set to Chair, Room, Desk, Vehicle, Slot, or anything else.
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Plural — used in lists and counts (defaults to "Tables"). Set to Chairs, Rooms, Desks, Vehicles, Slots.
Save and the label propagates everywhere the system used to say "Table" or "Tables":
- The sidebar menu link itself.
- The Floor Plan editor — "Add Chair", "Round Chair", "Delete this Chair", every confirmation prompt.
- The Reservations panel — "Select a Chair", "Available Chairs", "Reservations on this Chair", the floor-plan tab, every empty-state message.
- The POS picker when staff opens a dine-in cart.
- The customer cart at checkout — "Chair: 5" instead of "Table: 5".
- The order receipt (printed A4 and 57mm / 80mm thermal).
- The WhatsApp order confirmation sent to the merchant.
- The order-status page customers see after placing an order.
- The analytics dashboard ("Chair Reservations" instead of "Table Reservations").
Sidebar layout cleaned up at the same time
The old "Restaurant" section in the sidebar held three items — Kitchen Display, Status Display, Tables — and only made sense for restaurants. We dropped the section header and moved all three under the existing Apps group, where they sit alphabetically next to Floor Plan, Reservations, and any other modules you've enabled. A salon now sees a clean Apps list with their own labels; a restaurant sees the exact same item set, just labeled "Tables" by default.
Translated across 19 languages
The label override works in every language WhatsMenu supports — Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The placeholder slots into the localized sentence so a Portuguese salon merchant typing Cadeira sees "Selecione uma Cadeira", a Spanish auto dealer typing Vehículo sees "Vehículos disponibles", and so on.
A small caveat: in languages with grammatical gender (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, Polish), the surrounding sentence keeps the original gender of "table" — so a French salon's "Choisissez une Chaise" reads naturally, but a few phrasings will look slightly off. The label still gets through; minor grammar quirks are the trade-off for one-click flexibility.
Restaurants don't need to do anything special
Enable Tables under Settings → Apps (one click), leave the labels blank, and the system uses the original "Table" / "Tables" wording everywhere — exactly how it worked before.
Why this matters now
Floor Plan, POS, KDS and Reservations cover a lot of business types beyond restaurants — and the next wave of merchants joining WhatsMenu (salons, clinics, co-working hosts, dealerships) shouldn't have to mentally translate "table" every time they look at their dashboard or send a customer a confirmation. This is the smallest change that makes the rest of the platform feel native to whatever they actually do.